In educational and business situations, there is recognition of the need for improving the abilities of groups working on information intensive projects, in both the quality of the results and the efficiency with which information-intensive work is done. A significant portion of business and educational endeavors involve the joint conduct of information-intensive or inquiry-based projects by multiple individuals or even multiple sub teams. Such projects often include a broad range of problem solving activities, such as defining the problem, finding and analyzing information, formulating conclusions, hypotheses and alternatives, and in many cases developing an answer or course of action, and others. Such group or collaborative projects also often result in the production of one or more reports to convey the findings and/or recommendations or views to others.
A large number of workers are classified as knowledge workers and routinely formulate understanding about and solutions to rather unstructured or arbitrary problems. Research shows that most knowledge workers are assigned to teams for at least some portion of their work and that most teams are fairly large in their numbers of members. In addition, many if not most knowledge workers have professional or personal areas of interest in which they may pursue inquiry and the development of various documented understanding and reports as well. Informal communities of interest—whether professional or personal—are common, and individuals often seek each other out on an ad-hoc or informal collaborative or cooperative basis as well—sharing information and ideas about professional issues or personal hobbies and interests and the like.
Despite the prevalence of formal groups and informal collaborative networks conducting information-intensive projects together, computerized support for generalized, collaborative inquiry based projects is lacking. Most teams or collaborating individuals utilize at best a loose collection of computerized tools such as the Internet and search engines to find information, E-mail, tools such as Outlook, in some cases social networking tools to seek out others and communicate, and document production tools like Power Point or web authoring tools to produce results. In some instances, the teams may use tools like Lotus Notes or others to share documents and control versioning. However, generalized computer-based collaboration systems tend to focus on the mechanics of communication and document change management control, as opposed to providing support and additional value to the group or collaborative thinking, problem solving and information process itself.
In contrast, teams that work on very specialized project types may utilize specific specialized computerized systems that have a highly shared set of tools and provide a specific shared context for the group and team members—such as product development teams using CAD/CAM systems for product design. However, the team or group or collaborative support for information intensive, generalized or arbitrary problem solving to date has been lacking in a generalizable set of shared tools and problem solving context that assists significantly in the structure, content, or process of the problem solving work itself, or indeed for the content and problem solving process of the collaboration that occurs.
A familiar type of generalized collaboration computer support, for example, coordinates documents through version control allowing for participants to see versions, changes and attribute those changes to contributors. Another type of generalized computer supported collaboration is through email, instant messaging, the email conversation threads of SIG's and discussions, and other similar approaches. Generalized collaboration computer platforms largely at best are focused on the mechanics and management of the communication and document control, as opposed to the project content or group problem solving process.
As a result, the problems in supporting multi-user and collaborative or team work in inquiry based projects are many. One particular problem is the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of the interaction between individual knowledge work and group or collective or collaborative work. For example, typically, although an assignment is made to the individual to support the groups' goals and objectives, the individual knowledge workers often work independently using techniques they have found to be successful in the past, and typically utilizing more personal support through word processors, search engines and browsers, spread sheets, specialized tools like statistical packages, hand written notes, and other tools and approaches accepted and appropriate to the particular discipline. In many situations, meetings and points where group work needs to be pulled together cause additional work for the knowledge worker or sub team outside of their individual project content work, as they prepare summary or other review documents for group or collaborative session or reviews. Upon return from group meetings, the individual workers in this type of situation often largely revert to a work mode in the appropriate tools and manner for their detail efforts, which remain relatively hidden from the group as a whole. There is therefore often extra effort and time to translate to and from the personal detail work approach to the meeting formats, presentations, and group discussions, and little if any additional insight tends to be gained from this work. Collaboration between individuals occurs at best through joint text or other document authoring, or the sharing of documents augmented by emails and other communications.
In many cases, knowledge workers and individuals have generally learned their generalized, information intensive problem solving approaches throughout their education in schools and universities and through “trial and error”, and in some cases personal mentoring, on the job. There tends therefore not to be a shared problem solving and inquiry project process context to assist in discussions about the process or approaches being used by individuals and the group.
An additional problem with most group work supported by generalized computer systems or tools today is that the final presentation, written document or other similar media is often the most available or only documentation of the problem/project and as such only records the final solution and findings of the team, and little about the process and little about what was examined and rejected, and little about the process, rationale etc. This final report or product in many circumstances transfers very little depth of understanding to future work.
There is therefore a significant need for a system and method that enables generalized multi-user and group information-intensive thinking and problem solving in a collaborative manner to address these and additional needs and problems.